Last week Barack Obama spoke on Rosa Parks’ legacy in his weekly “podcast.” While Obama’s talk was relatively informal, his comments are still worth considering. Here’s a transcript of his remarks…
Two nights ago I received the news of the loss of a genuine American hero. As many of you now know, Rosa Parks died Monday at her home in Detroit. As it happened I was giving a speech the next day on education policy and was reading a chapter of Jonathan Kozol’s new book, The Shame of the Nation, in which he writes about his trips to schools throughout the country, reporting that – 50 years after Brown vs. Board Education – we have a educational system that is still visibly separate and painfully unequal. Kozol talks about his trip to Fremont High School in Los Angeles where he meets a couple of girls who tell him what it’s like to be in the school system there.
One girl starts talking about how she was taking hairdressing again. She had already taken a hairdressing course once. Apparently there were two different levels of hairdressing offered in this school. One was hair-styling; one was hair-braiding. A friend of hers, a girl named Mireya, listens in on the conversation and she suddenly begins to cry. When asked what’s wrong Mireya says:
I don’t want to take hairdressing. I do not need sewing either. I know how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I’m trying to go to college. I don’t need to sew to go to college. My mother sews. I hoped for something else.
I hoped for something else. That’s what Mireya says.
As I was thinking about this passage from the book that Jonathan Kozol has written, I was reminded of how far we have come and how far we have yet to go.
Rosa Parks was a seamstress. Despite the fact that she had trained at a teachers’ college. She had experienced the full brunt of Jim Crow. She had been forced to attend a run-down, one-room school house because she couldn’t attend the well-funded white school nearby. She had to work cleaning the classrooms of the teachers’ college because she didn’t have the fees. And once she got her teaching certificate she ended up working as a seamstress and a housekeeper instead of fully using her formidable intellect.
And so it’s important for us to recognize that times have changed. We have different opportunities now than we had then because of the enormous courage of this individual woman and of women like her all through the South. Women who were willing to walk for justice – instead of ride a bus – despite having worked all day doing someone else’s laundry or looking after someone else’s children.
This seemingly ordinary woman was able to bring about extraordinary transformations and in that sense represented the multitude of people from all walks of life who participated in one of the largest struggles to open up opportunity in America that we’ve ever seen.
That’s part of Rosa Parks’ legacy. But another part is listening to that young girl Mireya saying she “hoped for something else.” That seems to be the essence of the American dream and describes part of what Rosa Parks was all about. She refused the given of her reality and insisted we could be better – for herself, for her people, and for our nation. And it seems to me that as we think about how we might commemorate Rosa Parks, it shouldn’t just be lofty eulogies or namings of streets and schools and other inanimate objects. It seems to me that a part of what we should be trying to do is to capture that sense that we’re hoping for something else and we’re willing to fight for it. We’re not going to just leave it to leaders. We’re not going to leave it to the politicians. We’re not going to leave it to Barack Obama or to whoever the Democratic Party is, you know, selecting as the spokesperson for this or that occasion. But we’re going to look inside ourselves and ask ourselves what things do we think are true – what are the things that we care about deeply. How are we going to make sure that every child gets the education they need to prepare them for a global economy? How are we going to make sure that every person in need of health care has access? How do we deal with the kinds of environmental challenges our generation and future generations will face? Whatever moves us deeply – the way the imperative of freedom moved Rosa Parks – we have to act on it. To act on the hope for something else…
If we commit ourselves to carrying on that fight – one solitary act at a time – the fight for something bigger, bolder, brighter for ourselves and our country – we are living up to Rosa Parks’ example and giving her the kind of tribute she deserves…
From November, 2005